Hi -derivatives folks,
I'm attending this week the Ubuntu Developer Summit UDS-P, as a Debian
representative. Given yesterday has been the most relevant one for
Debian-related activities, here is a brief report about that.
Plenary
-------
I've given a brief plenary (15 min), reviewing what has happened on the
topic of Debian-Ubuntu relationships in the past 1.5 years [1]. Slides
of the plenary are available at [2]; there should be a video as well,
but don't ask me where :-). The executive summary is something like:
- a tentative timeline of Debian-Ubuntu relationships, highlighting the
"crisis" period
- state of the art around UDS-M
- mutual presentation of views of the two communities back then
- brief summary of my UDS-M talk
- work that has happened in the past 1.5 years
- Ubuntu-side: increase in patch forwarding, "Debian first" guidelines
for universe packages, flow of Ubuntu people becoming involved in
Debian, mixed teams
- Debian-side: all the initiatives of the Derivatives Front Desk
(essentially the same I've reviewed in my DebConf11 talk on the
subject [3])
- state of the art as of today
- good progress in forwarding changes to Debian
- less progress in getting Canonical-originated software into Debian
(topic that has also been discussed in the Debian health check
session, see below)
- new opportunities: joint mentoring to train Debian packagers, no
matter the distro
- new challenges: Ubuntu's App Review Board and its impact on Debian
(and on the notion of distribution in general)
- our view on the Free Software ecosystem
- Free Software is more important than Debian, Ubuntu, and any single
project
- we want contribution to flow upstream as much as possible, no matter
where they originated
- do you agree on this vision?
[1] rationale for such a time frame: the first presentation of Debian
views on Debian-Ubuntu collaboration to the UDS public, which
happened at UDS-M 1.5 years ago
[2] http://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2011/20111031-uds.pdf
[3] http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/761.en.htm
Debian Health Check session
---------------------------
UDS has a regular "Debian Health Check" session to review the state of
collaboration with Debian, from the Ubuntu point of view. I've took part
into it for UDS-P, together with about a dozen other DDs who happened to
be there (/me too lazy to list them here :-)).
Stefano Rivera has done a wonderful job as taking notes during the
session (thanks!), so that I can shut up and simply attach his notes.
Feel free to ask more info about specific items.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

#uds-p #community #debian
Review previous work-items from UDS-O
- DDs having access to LP via their debian-keyring GPG keys for filing
bugs. Bug was LP:#252368
- LP build failures due to regexes on build logs. We should probably have a
way to do this locally, maybe forward -Werror build flags for this?
Button to submit bugs to Debian?
Probably get pushback from Debian...
submittodebian is already not getting enough bug editorial.
Laney to pull lp bug descriptions in submittodebian
Forwarded bugs need to be linked back to LP. This requires waiting for a
debbugs number. Can this be automated? Possibly via a address @launchpad that
could receive bug filed email and do the link. This way, the mail filing the
bug in Debian just needs to X-Debbugs-Cc: the launchpad address and include the
launchpad bug number (in the address?) to let launchpad make the bug watch
Problem: authentication of the e-mail. DKIM on debbugs (and deployed on
bugs.debian.org in particular)?
nhandler had a list of people who are active in both projects. Can we have a
live version of this?
Activity can be defined simply as doing uploads.
ARB:
There are concerns about ARB, and how it changes distribution development.
This was accompianied with discussions on reducing the Ubuntu arcihve size. We
can judge from removal complaints that people use and care about all the
corners of the Ubuntu archive.
The concerns are that this could lose the opportunity of getting a packge into
Debian. ARB charter states that these apps should be pushed towards Debian when
possible.
One question about the packages that are forwarded to Debian, is how do we link
these with people who can do the uploads in Debian and do sponsorship for this
in the future.
One option is go to mentors, but it's demotivating to be passed around a
lot. One also wouldn't want to affect the mentoring balance on -mentors.
We need to build a mentoring community, doesn't need to be Debian or Ubuntu
specific. REVU may also be merged into debian-metors.
The pkgme messy packages probably aren't candidates for getting into Debian.
Package name conflicts: Because new packages only come into extras / software
centre after release, the conflict with future releases is restricted to
upgrades.
glib-gtk Unity patches may be forward-able to Debian. Not scrollbars (probably)
There are a couple of people in Debian interested in getting Unity in. Some of
the parts require patches all over the place.
This should be better documented (e.g. an ITP blocked by other bugs).
There are places where Ubuntu needs to be a better upstream, if it really has
an interest in having the software in other distributions. Packages which are
in Debian, but very out of date.
Debian can have different requirements (e.g. non-linux ports), making this work
harder.
Work items
[bryce]: DD LP access
[laney]: pull lp bug descriptions in submittodebian
[stefanor]: list of people who are active in both projects
[zack]: Talk to asheesh about the missing features from REVU.